Hi thanks for the tips. Unfortunately this is not what I am after.

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? import numpy as num ? startarray = random((1000,100)) ? take_sample = [1,2,5,6,1,2] ? temp = num.take(startarray,take_sample,axis=1) Would it help to make temp a 1000x4 array instead of 1000x6? Could you do that by changing take_sample to [1,2,5,6] and multiplying columns 1 and 2 by a factor of 2? That would slow down the construction of temp but speed up the addition (and slicing?) in the loop below.

No it wouldn't help unfortunately, because the second instance of "1,2" would have different shifts. So I cannot just count the number of occurrence of each line. From the initial 2D array, 1D lines could be extracted several times, with each time a different shift.

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? shift = [10,20,34,-10,22,-20] ? result = num.zeros(900) ?# shorter than initial because of the shift ? for i in range(len(shift)) : ? ? ?result += temp[100+shift[i]:-100+shift[1]] This looks fast to me. The slicing doesn't make a copy nor does the addition. I've read that cython does fast indexing but I don't know if that applies to slicing as well. I assume that shift[1] is a typo and should be shift[i].

(yes of course the shift[1] should be shift[i]) Well this may be fast, but not fast enough. And also, starting from my 2D startarray again, it looks odd that I cannot do something like: startarray = random((1000,100)) take_sample = [1,2,5,6,1,2] shift = [10,20,34,-10,22,-20] result = num.sum(num.take(startarray,take_sample,axis=1)[100+shift:100-shift]) but of course this is nonsense because I cannot address the data this way (with "shift"). In fact I realise now that my question is simpler: how do I extract and sum 1d lines from a 2D array if I want first each line to be "shifted". So starting again now, I want a quick way to write: startarray = random((1000,6)) shift = [10,20,34,-10,22,-20] result = num.zeros(1000, dtype=float) for i in len(shift) : result += startarray[100+shift[i]:900+shift[i]] Can I write this directly with some numpy indexing without the loop in python? thanks for any tip. Eric